Certainly hope the game they promised comes out i'd love to fucking play that. No doubt.
But the excuses they have aren't all that legitimate. Some of the challenges on the technical side are serious but they knew them going in. The scope of the game, while large, isn't unique. There are many games that incorporate as many or more into a single entity as they are trying to do.
They are building a smaller, heavily instanced version of Eve Online that sacrifices size and scale for combat and realism. Trading epic space battles between thousands of players in a single uninstanced universe for gritty, realistic dogfighting between a small number of players. The feature lists are basically identical, they just focus on different aspects. But really it comes down to Epic space battles vs small scale dogfighting because the rest of the feature list is just tedium. Both games offer excessive tedium. Eve is right click context menu excel tedium while SC is walking around repairing your ship stacking stuff into crates so you can stack crates and don't forget to fuel up your ship tedium. You will be bored to tears either way but SC will look prettier while doing it.
Variise didn't jizz all over the announcement because he knows this isn't all that much really. It's basically the same as pantheon releasing a playable pre-alpha of what they have now, both teams are about at the same point in the development cycle. SC will probably get their first because they have more talent and can leverage that more efficiently (assuming pantheon doesn't run out of money and release what they have unfinished) but they are at the same place. Yeah SC had to build a lot of their stuff while pantheon went middleware and asset store, but again compare the resources of the two.
The excuses Variise does offer boil down to "SC mismanaged their finances" which seems like a fair assessment. Otherwise the excuse boils down to "we overestimated our talent and abilities" or "we bit off more than we can chew" which is a lot worse. No one is saying they are a bunch of talentless hacks. They seem to be putting out a high quality product. But given their manpower, money and time they are well behind where anyone else would of been. It's not like they are reinventing the wheel here. Nothing they are doing is super innovative or hasn't been done before. They are just adding a fuck ton of realistic tedium to a space game and making the multiplayer quasi-mmo-light.
I want to correct something here on the "tedium".
So their plan is to let you do basic transactions without having to leave your ship. Things like repair, fuel, sell your cargo or buy the resources available at the port. If I understand it correctly you will be able to do this via your MobiGlas. The arm gadget that just got implemented in SC 2.0 It's bare bones right now but you can see the early UI for it. So at most you may have to get out of your chair and engage it or they might create an animation to let you uses it right from the chair which IMO they should let you do. Basic missions available at that port may also be made available in this way but I'm not sure.
Here are things they said you won't be able to do from your ship and you will have to get out of your seat for:
Smuggling illegal cargo through port security.
Speaking to shady contacts for illegal missions.
Speaking to a bartender to get "rumors" which can lead to Points of Interest (can be anything from a wreck, broken down merchant seeking help, pirate/alien attack on a friendly ship/NPC, abandoned ship/station to explore etc. with any of these possibly leading to a randomized mission arc just like any other mission. If you don't know what a mission arc is see below.
Assassination missions or pirate missions requiring you to bypass port security with your false ID and scanner proof cargo containers etc.
As for the tedium of walking around well there is no safety anywhere from NPCs. So even in "Green" zones where there is no PvP allowed it does not apply to NPCs. A gang might jump you in an alley as you head to your contact or wait for you until you have something on the way back. You might run into pick pockets or even assassins or bounty hunters if you pissed off the wrong NPC in your travels.
The idea is to not ever allow any area outside of your own personal hangar to be 100% safe. Why? Tension. Love the idea or hate it that is the current plan. I personally love the idea that anything can happen.
Plus missions might be generated from just about anything.
Ok so they haven't given us a deep dive yet on how missions will work but they did talk about it at length during previous major events even as far back as a year ago. So in the above I gave some examples of how some missions might be generated. The idea is you can complete that in the first stage and call it a day and move on to the next one. Having said that it's possible that if you pay attention you might unlock a second stage to a mission. You are not required to do it and in fact you may not be able to do it alone. At any time any stage might be so difficult that you will need friends to complete it. An example goes something like this:
You go to a bar and talk to the bartender and he tells you a rumor about some wet nosed pilot trying to make an illegal run through UEE space and dumping his cargo at the first sign of a UEE patrol. You get the POI location and go to it. You find a floating crate and get it into your cargo hold. Inside you find illegal loot you can choose to smuggle into a port if you have a scanner proof crate to move the items into it and potentially make a killing on it. There is a data chip stashed inside the crate. If you open it you find that it's locked. You can hack it and if you do you find out who the loot came from and it turns out to be some scary pirate port. At this point you can hand over the illegal goods to the UEE or sell it. You can choose to go to the pirate port and track down the NPC that gave that NPC the illegal mission. You find them and you can choose to become a drug mule since it's a mission contact. You might uncover a way to locate a pirate base where they make the drug. At this point you may need friends to raid the pirate base.
So that's one variation. Each stage of that is supposed to be modular and can attach to other mission modules creating a unique mission arc each time. You can quit at any stage and not purpose the mission further. Some can be returned to anytime and others might be limited in availability.
Based on what we heard so far this is way way out there in terms of timeline to complete. They want this up and running by end of 2016 but we should get chunks of it patched in here and there over the next 12 months. So it's not like the above is going to be reality in 3 months. It's more like one aspect of it will be a reality in a month or two and then maybe another feature of it gets patched in a few months later and on and on it goes until the whole thing is up and running in the next 12-13 months.
